The Jordan Harbinger Show - 710: Sebastian Junger | How War and Crisis Create a Tribe

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Sebastian Junger (@sebastianjunger) is a journalist, filmmaker, and bestselling author of The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea. He joins us to discuss his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging and what he's learned by covering war for the past 20 years. [Note: This is a previously broadcast episode from the vault that we felt deserved a fresh pass through your earholes!]  What We Discuss with Sebastian Junger: Why do some people get addicted to war and recall times of crisis with fondness? Does an affluent society free of hardship and danger deprive its citizens of an intrinsic need to be useful? Are war journalists armed, and do they contribute to group defense in the field? What happens when someone who’s been through war comes home, and why is it often so difficult for them to reintegrate into society? Why is there a phrase for “going native” but not “going civilized?” And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/710 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss the show we did with Molly Bloom — the woman behind the most exclusive, high-stakes underground poker game in the world? Catch up here with episode 120: Molly Bloom | The One Who Makes the Rules Wins the Game! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Affluent societies don't produce communities that need the individual for anything. That great human capacity for serving the group goes unused in affluent society. Well, just bomb it for a while, and all of a sudden, that quality becomes important again, and people suddenly feel like it was the most meaningful time in their lives. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists,

even the occasional Fortune 500 CEO, National Security Advisor, undercover agent or former jihadi, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and of course, I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic. That helps new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Topics like persuasion, influence, disinformation in cyber warfare,

China and North Korea, investing in financial crimes, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, one from the vault recorded several years ago, I think in five, six, seven years ago now. We're talking with Sebastian Younger. He's a journalist, former war correspondent, and most famous for the bestselling book, the perfect storm. You know, the one with the waves and the boats. He's also got a handful of award-winning films under his belt, including Restrepo, Koringal, and The Last Patrol. His newest book at the time of this recording was Tribe. I may or may not have consumed all of the above in

preparation for this interview. In this episode, we discuss going off to war, why humans get addicted to war, what happens when we come home, and why it's so difficult for soldiers to reintegrate to society. Even if you're not a soldier, you're not even American, you'll find the values and concepts we're talking about here in this episode important and applicable to your life as part of society as a whole. Sebastian is a deep thinker and I know you're going to enjoy this episode from the vault with Sebastian Younger. So Sebastian, tell us what you do in one sentence. I'm a journalist and author and filmmaker and I attempt to experience and understand the world so that I can explain it to others. Why do you say attempt to understand and explain? Because I was raised to

have a certain amount of humility about the things we all do in our lives. How close do you think you come to understanding those topics? Because you do obviously immerse yourself really well in the topics in what you're doing. I mean, you're in the war zone with the guys sleeping on the ground. You can't get much closer than that. My experience with American soldiers was probably, some ways, the easiest of all of my wartime experiences. I mean, the really rough trips were, you know, Afghanistan and the 90s, African Civil Wars

that I covered. Those are really hard on me. And how close do I get? I think I get pretty close. I'm trained as an anthropologist, and I feel like that discipline gives you a way, gives you tools for understanding human society in very, very basic terms. And those basic terms are still very much operational in what we think of as modern society. It doesn't, you know, humans haven't changed that much. I think I have one level of things. I mean, I get the sort

of anthropological deconstruction of our behavior. There's all kinds of other ways of understanding us. There's the political, you could look at the war in Afghanistan in completely political terms. I don't, but other people do as they should. It's important. You could look at it in historical terms, strategic terms, whatever. What I choose to do is understand things anthropologically so that we can understand the human behaviors that might otherwise not really make sense. Why were the African wars so much harder? I mean, I can venture, I guess, but I am curious. Well, I mean, if you're in a platoon of American soldiers in combat, you know that you can completely trust everyone around you. You know, no one's going to shoot you in the back of the head because they're high on, you know, methamphetamines and drunk out of their mind. You know, I mean, you don't have to doubt their trustworthiness, their sobriety. If you get hit, if you get hurt, there's a betic right there and you'll be better back.

I mean, you're among countrymen and friends. And in West Africa, the thing that was terrifying about it was that the sheer level of sort of nihilism in the society and, you know, eight-year-old of machine guns. who were cranked out of their mind on drugs. And not only did they not care if you lived or died, they didn't really care if they lived or died. And it's just, there's no comparison in those situations. We've heard of child soldiers and things like that. But very rarely do we take any kind of deep dive into that?

I mean, other than watching, what was that movie, Blood Diamond, where they have a sort of a glimpse into that world, maybe Hollywood couldn't even relay the truth because it would have just been too much for the viewer. That kind of experience must take an emotional toll that, do you still think about that stuff? you still wake up thinking like, oh, crap, I'm back in Sierra Leone or whatever? No, I had a lot of bad dreams, a lot of psychological consequences from the Civil Wars that I

covered in Africa, but, you know, it's been a long time now. It's been 15 years. The last Civil War I was in was Liberia in 2003. That was a complete and utter nightmare, and I had a lot of issues after that, but, you know, that stuff goes away. How does it go away? What do you have to do or what happens? I mean, you know, humans where animals were adapted to survive trauma and adapted for that matter to survival with anything. You know, if you have a car accident if you experience a violent assault, if you're in a war zone, if whatever,

like the most severe consequences come quite quickly and then they diminish over time and eventually it's not that you're unchanged. I mean, of course, you're changed by those experiences but you recover psychologically and can function fine. I mean, most people recover psychologically can function fine.

So, you know, if you experience a great tragedy and you grieve, you're not functional for the first week. If your girlfriend or boyfriend and dies in college, in a car accident, you're probably not functional for about a week, and you're probably seriously messed up for a month. And you're definitely, like, you're still grieving, you know, a year later, five years, 10 years later,

you're probably not still grieving them. And it's the same thing with PTSD. You've got multiple films, the latest book that I read as well, Tribe, and I'm watching Restrepo and sort of these documentaries where you're embedded in Afghanistan. It was amazing to me to see these guys, because there's really candid footage of guys reacting to people getting wounded,

and people dying in firefights and what they're thinking when other guys they see as better fighters than them or more athletic or guys they look up to when those guys are killed what it kind of does to these guys psychologically and they can't sleep anymore and they don't know how to process the images and the memories.

You juxtapose that with these guys blowing off steam by dance ambushing their teammates and blasting this like ridiculously cheesy house music and showing up in their underwear to wake somebody up. These guys are basically young guys I'd consider kids back home in the States. It's like I would expect to see these guys working at some place downtown San Jose or San Francisco

hanging out, basically knowing what I knew at age 22, which was nothing. You can still see that part of them is still a kid, but they've been thrust into what seems like the worst possible part of human nature or adulthood for some of us, virtually overnight. I would say it's also in some ways the best parts of human nature. I mean, they are trained to value the lives of others as highly as they value their own life. I mean, it's an extreme generosity, and they do everything collectively. There really is an ethos of serving the group. I mean, all of these like very, very ancient, noble human ideals, for very pragmatic

survival reasons are abundantly in evidence in combat. And so, yeah, it's the worst environment in the world. It also, oddly, creates the best behavior and the best practices. That is the self really devoted to the group. That's our evolutionary origins. and they're reproduced pretty closely in combat in a platoon. And it's amazing to watch platoon, I was with those old men. It's amazing to watch these young men who clearly as humans were sort of wired to do this,

like watch them respond to that environment and react for the most part, like incredibly well. There wasn't a guy in that platoon who wouldn't have risked his life for any other person in the platoon. Those are very noble human behaviors. So you actually don't see that in, quote, better situations like the kind of suburb I grew up in. the 80s. Well, what kind of suburb did you grow up in the 80s? What was the situation when you were growing up that was different? You know, I grew up in a pretty affluent, mostly white suburb of Boston. You know, there was virtually no crime. There was certainly no hardship. There was nothing that would test a young man like myself. I didn't have to somehow decide that my community

needed me and that I should make sacrifices for my community because they need me. I mean, that has been the human condition for hundreds of thousands of years. And all of a sudden, you know, we live in a Western society, which is affluent enough that young people aren't really called to make sacrifices for their people, for their community. And I mean, that's the first time humans that live like that. You know, frankly, it leaves a part of you, that's the part of me, feeling deeply unsatisfied, deeply sort of underutilized. And that's how you got into war reporting, right? You wanted some kind of test of manhood, some kind of trial by fire. Yeah, there was a number of strands to it. I mean, I went to Bosnia in the early 90s during the Civil War. I was in

Sarajevo. Nothing particularly horrific happened, but still it was an intense experience. I was in my early 30s. I'd worked as a climber for tree companies for years. I wanted to be a writer. Going to a war zone was a kind of practical solution to the problem of how do I break into the trade, the craft of journalism. And there was partly a practical solution to that. And it was partly, you know, I felt like having grown up in this fairly comfortable way that I'd never really been tested and I wanted to be tested. And there is many ways to test yourself. I mean, I could have had a kid at that age and been tested as a father. I mean, that's another way of being tested as all kinds of ways. The way that compelled me was putting myself in a situation where I didn't know if I would literally physically survive it. That was a war zone. I've been to Sarajevo as well, actually. It was a life-changing experience. I wasn't there in the early 90s, that's for sure.

But it was amazing to see and hear from people how horrible everything was back then and how fresh the memory was in everybody's mind. I was there in 2004, so it was already a decade later. but it was like a lot of the people that remembered it like yesterday. One thing I thought was really strange was a lot of people were happier during the middle of this absolute horrendous crisis. And that experience was mirrored in Belgrade when people said their favorite time when they were younger was when the U.S. was bombing Serbia. Well, that's one of these counterintuitive things that once you start looking into it,

it's just incredibly common, that hardship and danger produce positive emotional reactions of people. If you think about it in evolutionary terms, it couldn't be otherwise. I mean, if hardship and danger produced bad human behaviors, produced selfishness, produce people just looking out for themselves, not taking care of the group. If it produced those kinds of antisocial behaviors, the human race wouldn't survive. We evolved in very, very dangerous environment. We are the descendants of people who responded in socially positive ways to hardship and danger, and therefore we do. So you take a pretty affluent society, and then you vomit for a while, and of course people die and it's tragedies and it's horrible.

But people rally around the community in very selfless ways. You know, humans want to be needed. We want to be necessary. We want to be essential to our community. Affluent societies don't produce communities that need the individual for anything. That great human capacity for serving the group

goes unused in affluent society. Well, just vomit for a while and all of a sudden that quality becomes important again, and people suddenly feel like it was the most meaningful time in their lives. I don't think many people would voluntarily go back to it, but they certainly look back on it with a kind of longing. And that was true in Sarajevo, it was true in London during the Blitz.

It was even true in Germany. I mean, you know, I read this one study where American psychologists had talked to German psychologists after the war. And the German psychologists said they could understand it. The cities in Germany with the lowest morale were the cities that were not bombed by the allies. And the cities that were bombed the worst, bombed the hardest like Dresden, were the cities that had the the highest morale. Incredible. Yeah, completely counterintuitive and only makes sense in the context of there being some kind of switch in the back of our brain that requires extreme adversity in order to trigger. When you're up on the mountain, when you're up in Restrepo, the operating

posts, you must be constantly worried about losing someone. And I would imagine if I were there, I would have been very attached to these guys and worrying about them all the time. When you're sort of in the moment, I wouldn't quite phrase it like that because I was also worried about myself getting hurt. What was very, very hard was being away from there. What I really worried about them was when I was safe. And that was a kind of intolerable feeling. I'd be back in the United States. I came and went, you know, Tim and I came and went pretty regularly, and I'd be back in the United States. I had enormous anxiety about that something would happen. I'm one of those guys, you know, while I was gone, not that I could have done anything about it, and I was a civilian. I'm not even a soldier.

I mean, my reaction shows you the power of those feelings of group concern and a sort of collective outcome. We all survive together or we die together. I mean, and ironically, that mentality increases the chances of survival. And that's why it exists. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Sebastian Younger. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, I've got a great networking course for you. It's a free course. It's just about how I've built my network over the years, not in the schmoozy gross way. It's about developing your networking and your connection skills, and helping people develop relationships with you. It'll help you at work. It'll help you in your personal life. It'll make you a better thinker.

It's again, free at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on our show, they subscribe and they contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, back to Sebastian Younger. I can see that. I mean, even while watching and hearing the guys talk, me and Jen, I was watching this with my girlfriend, she would say something like, I really hope that guy's a lot. at the end of this. And I'm thinking, they're all alive at the end of this, because you find yourself just, even just by virtue of watching it through the screen, you feel a little tiny percentage of that adversity when the bullets are flying in and the guys are firing back. And then they're

talking about, yeah, when we go home, we're going to visit this guy. And she's like, oh, my God, if he dies, I can't handle it. And I'm thinking, it's just like, I don't want to see anything happen. And so when you're there, it's got to just be that much more intense. Although, yeah, at that point, you're also worried about yourself getting something taken off. I think you're right. When you're safe and you know that you're safe, it's harder to see that happen among other people. And that might explain the low morale among the German cities that were outside the war. Well, you know, I found this amazing study from Ireland. The Irish psychologist was looking at depression rates within Irish society during what we're called the Troubles. There's 1969, 70, 1970 riots in

Belfast or Northern Ireland. So what he found was that the depression rates declined in the areas that saw the most violence. They literally went down. And the only area in Northern Ireland that saw depression rates rise was County Derry that saw no violence at all. You know, it's funny because he said, look, obviously we don't want to start wars in order to treat societal depression rates. But his theory was that the people in the peaceful counties knew that their brothers and sisters were suffering in other county, suffering this violence. They knew it was going on, but they couldn't do anything about it. And they weren't part of the fight, but they knew the fight was going on.

That didn't make women more depressed, but it made men more depressed. And they clearly felt the moral responsibility to help their brothers, but they couldn't do it. And that was intolerable. So think about veterans coming home. They know people who are still overseas fighting, and part of them is just like, damn, what am I doing here? Like, I go over to help. And that's where you get depression and, you know, other related problems and veterans. We spoke to Dan Harris, who wrote a book called 10% Happier, and he's a nightline guy on ABC,

and he had covered Afghanistan a little bit of Iraq, I think, as well. And the guys in Restreple as well, we're talking about the high of gunfights, and they're on constant patrols where they're in firefights daily, and Dan Harris had mentioned that when he was there, he didn't realize it, but when he got home, he also felt like not only did he have some sort of obligation for the people that he was around, but there's a certain high that comes with being in a war zone, it's probably part adrenaline and probably a mix of all kinds of different things from oxytocin to adrenaline and fight or flight. And he ended up self-medicating when he got back to the United States

because he was hooked on different feelings that were not present in Western civilization where you can order a pizza with your phone without even making a phone call. Yeah, I mean, I should say that there are situations. Firemen and firehouses get a lot of what happens in combat. I think very intense bonding, the group affiliation, and of course the adrenaline of fighting. And, of enemy that could kill you, you get a lot of that. There are other jobs, logging, forest firefighting, drilling for oil, very, very dangerous work, commercial fishing. I mean, there are situations that call on a lot of those skills and a lot of that sort of human loyalty to get through it. But, yeah, in American society in general, the stakes aren't as high. When the stakes aren't as high,

the sense of meaningfulness is not as high. I mean, meaningfulness goes up with consequences. And when consequences are low, the sense of meaning is quite low. And we don't. And we like meaningfulness, will actually risk our lives in order to achieve a sense of meaningfulness in our lives. I mean, it's amazing. Clearly, that sense of meaning and purpose and belonging to a group were absolutely vital in our human evolution because we will literally risk our lives in order to have those feelings. And modern society is blessed in many ways. And one of the ways in which is blessed is that it's not life and death takes at every moment as you're walking down the street usually.

We have safety, we have a certain amount of comfort and material security, but there is a downside to that, and the downside is that there's a less of a sense of meaning. And it's not patriotic, right? I noticed that they weren't fighting for patriotism necessarily. Maybe that's what it got them to join up, but they were all fighting for each other.

The guys were bleeding and they're missing limbs or whatever, and they're asking, is this guy okay, is that guy okay? Where's this guy? Where's this other guy? Oh, he's back there. Oh, okay. It's like they're not even concerned as much with themselves. Is that training, or is that? Is that just what happens when you spend tons of time with people or fight next to them in situations like this?

I mean, you can't train someone to value another person's life over their own. You can't train, say, a parent, a mother to be more worried about their child's life than their own life. That's evolutionary wiring. Interestingly, when you have a group of people that feel that way about each other, that unit is more effective in combat than a group of people that don't feel that way about each other. and as a result, their chances of survival go up. Individually, their chances of survival go up because they are prepared to risk their life or sacrifice their life for other people

that makes them tactically more effective and then all of their chances of survival go up. And it's a really sort of strange irony. If you're in a unit where everyone's just trying to save their own ass in combat, everybody dies. I mean, that's the irony of trying to save yourself and only yourself as everybody dies in combat. You know, obviously the human virtues of generosity and altruism and heroism and

courage. I mean, we venerate those ideals, those behaviors, you know, precisely because they had enormous survival value in our evolution. When you're filming this, are you filming the entire time? I mean, are you filming like all day, every day? Well, yeah, we filmed every day. We didn't produce 24 hours of footage per day. I mean, we were being a little bit selected, but yeah, yeah, my video camera never left my shoulder. You're not armed at all when you're up there, you kind of like, all right, look, I need to have something in case... Anything that happens to me is going to be happening to the whole platoon. I'm not in any kind of individual situation ever.

No, I was not. I mean, there's an ethical problem, but also you're just not contributing to the group safety unless you've been trained. It's like trying to help out the New England Patriots, like on the football pitch, right? Okay, you've got one more guy on the field. You're really going to help? No, probably not. Unless you know what you're doing, unless you've been trained with that team,

well, that's the same with a platoon in combat. You have to know what you're doing. But, you know, if someone needs you to carry a can of ammo across the outpost because they're running low on 240 ammo, like, I mean, yeah, but the monkey could do that. I mean, that's not really participating in group defense. Why is it hard for guys to come back from war? Why are we developing disorders and things like that when we come home? Well, it's hard for civilians, too. And again, going back to Sarajevo, as you said, and as I encountered in Sarajevo, a lot of people miss the war. A lot of people in London miss the blitz. War, and for that matter, any kind of catastrophe in earthquake or whatever, requires people. to function communally and to put their own needs sort of in the backseat to support their community first. And then because they're part of that community, they will get taken care of second. There's something about that that humans are wired to really respond to in positive ways.

And war is one of the situations that does that. Then the war ends and you go back to your old selfish independent behaviors and, you know, it's a great liberty, but it doesn't feel good. So when you say, why is it hard to come back for war? what you're really saying is why is it hard to go from communalism to individualism? That's actually the transition that's being made. The reason that's hard is because we're a communal social species and we're wired to exist in communal groups where we're dependent on the group for our survival and the group is dependent on us to contribute and all those things are reinforced psychologically, hormonally,

culturally, socially. and then when you lose that, when you leave your platoon and wind up back in your cul-de-sac and the great American suburb, it's going against two million years of human evolution, and it does not feel good. And this is nothing new. As you noted in tribe, tons of white settlers in early America defected to Indian tribes, and it almost never happened the other way around. That was super interesting.

I never heard about that. Obviously, wouldn't be a popular topic in the 80s and 90s teaching American history generally and probably still isn't. What does civilization, especially Western civilization, do to people and their mental and emotional health that causes us to want to run back to something different? I mean, obviously this phenomenon's been going for so long, this communal living.

Is there any way, one, how does civilization destroy that? And two, is there any way we can get that back without destroying everything that we've built? Yeah, it's interesting to note that we have this nice phrase to go native, right? And we all kind of know what that means and why it's appealing. And we don't say to go civilized.

Like no one goes civilized, right? It's the thing we're all trying to escape. Really what you're talking about, you talk about to go native is to join a society, a sort of organic tribal society that's functioning communally. And that has enormous appeal. And I think it always has, I think it always will. Not only were settlers along the frontier

are sort of absconding to take up with the Indian, but even people who were captured in Indian raids on frontier settlements and isolated farms. and they were captured and adopted in the Indian tribes, and often when given the chance, you know, year or two later, whatever, to be repatriated, often they refused. They didn't want to leave their adopted tribe. And that made me think of the American soldiers.

I mean, a lot of the soldiers that I was with said that they didn't want to go back to the United States. They were called white Indians, actually, the white captains of the Indians who didn't want to come back. Like, they were called white Indians. Maybe think of the white Indians. Like, what is it about the society that makes everyone not want to return to it? You know, your question, basically, can we have it all? I mean, can we have the amazing benefits and blessings of this modern society? The list is endless.

How fortunate we are to live in this society. I mean, your rule of law, science, technology, I mean, you know, it goes on and on. Can we have those benefits and have the kind of communalism and group identity that clearly make people feel good? I don't know. That communalism arises spontaneously during times of hardship. Can it arise by choice during times of plenty? Who knows?

I would like to think there's things we could do to make our society more cohesive, more organic, socially organic, but it would be a new trick for the human race. On the other hand, so was walking on the moon and we figured it out. It looks like earlier civilizations like Native Americans and other cultures,

they'd figure this out, right? The Indians had, and I know that there's something around that word that you'd explain in your book, but you use the word Indians, so I guess I will too. Indians and other cultures have after war rituals and ceremonies to integrate veterans back into society. How do those work?

That was really interesting. Do you know what's going on there? Yeah, that native tribes in this country, probably most tribal societies in the world, understand that the psychological stresses of combat are enormous and that the transition from a combat state of mind to being back in your community with women and children and there's no physical threat,

that transition is difficult. And so a lot of native peoples have ceremonies, rituals that help people transition from the battlefield to the home, to the community. And often they involve a kind of dramatic retelling of your battlefield exploits. And those exploits are danced and sung and drummed and recounted in many different ways. And, you know, basically you're saying to your community, this is what I did for you. This is what a badass I am. This is how close who I came to almost getting killed, but we beat the enemy.

and here we are back victorious and we lost some of our brothers and we're going to mourn them. And then we're going to go out again and take revenge on the tribe. They killed our brothers. And I remember when I was at Restrepo, it wasn't my trip. Tim was on this trip and filmed it. But the footage he shot was incredible. It was after some guys were chosen company guys were killed and in the town of whatnot. And they lost a bunch of guys.

And everyone at Restrepo in the Kornagal, in Battle Company, were just devastated when they got the news. and Captain Kearney said, basically I grieve as much as you want for like an hour. I want you to grieve and I want you to get over it and then you're going to do your jobs and tomorrow we're going to make

the enemy feel like we feel right now. We're going to go kill them and we're going to make them feel as bad as we feel right now. So in the ceremonies, they allow the warrior to explain what he did for the community and they give away, you know, a proactive way to deal with feelings of grief,

which is revenge, which obviously keeps wars going, but just in terms of the sort of psychological benefits to the individual. I mean, fortunately today, whether we go to war or not are not in that. Those choices are not made by, you know, 20-year-old males who grew up wanting to be soldiers. Like those choices are made by older people that hopefully are more rational. But nevertheless, those ceremonies can be incredibly therapeutic just in terms of the catharsis of telling your community openly and directly what you did for them and forcing them to hear it.

I mean, that's the problem is we never, in our society, we wage war and we actually never have to hear from the people who fight for us what they did for us and how it made them feel. If that happened, if we could do that, liberals would feel very uncomfortable at how much many soldiers enjoy combat. I grew up in a liberal household. I know exactly what that reaction would be. Conservatives, I think, be uncomfortable at honest accounts of how angry being forced to fight at war can make people. and no one is comfortable with the incredible levels of grief that every war creates on all sides because you lose people, you lose brothers, you're never going to get them back, and you feel like you'll never get over that tragedy. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Sebastian Younger.

We'll be right back. Thank you so much for supporting the show, or at least for listening to the show. Hopefully you're also supporting the show, the advertisers, the discount codes, all those fancy pants URLs. They're all in one place. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find them. You can also search for any sponsor using the search box on the website as well. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Sebastian Younger. So what is PTSD? Speaking of grief and emotional trauma, what's going on here? Of course, it's going through the roof because there's more conflict and we're fighting on multiple fronts. But what else is happening here? PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder. You don't have to be a soldier to get it. You certainly don't have to be in a one.

zone in the short term, it's a healthy reaction to trauma. So if you've been traumatized, your life is probably in danger, and I'm speaking as an animal, the human animal designed to survive, if it's been traumatized in some way, if it's seen dead bodies, if it's experienced a direct threat to its life. The human animal responds in pretty predictable ways. You want to be alert. You want to jump at unexpected noises because it may be that thing coming back to kill you again, you know, the tiger or whatever it was. You want to be a little bit depressed to keep you. keeps you out of circulation until the danger is past. You want to be quick to anger.

You know, in case you are confronted, you're prepared to fight. You want to have dreams and nightmares that remind you of the threat that almost killed you or that did kill your family or your friends. In the short term, those are all adaptive behaviors that typify a healthy response to trauma. The problem is when those behaviors get sort of ingrained permanently and you're in a perpetual trauma loop that lasts for years or in your whole life. That's long-term PTSD. For most of human history, trauma was experienced collectively, just because life was experienced

collectively for most of human history. And the recovery from trauma was a collective process. What's very, very hard on people now is that the trauma is experienced collectively in a platoon or what have you. But the recovery happened individually because the deployment ends, everyone gets picked up and dropped back down in their cul-de-sac in their suburb or wherever they live. They're not with their platoon. They're not with their wartime community, and they're trying to recover alone in isolation and not with the community that they experience that trauma in. That is not natural, and I think that probably leads to very high rates of long-term trauma.

In addition, it should be noted that only around 10% of the U.S. military is regularly engaged in combat. So most of the military actually isn't even traumatized, and a much higher percentage than 10% experiences transition disorders when they come back to this country. Because PTSD is the word that everyone knows, it gets called and even gets diagnosed as PTSD, but for a lot of these people that weren't traumatized, by definition, it can't be fat. But it is certainly a kind of depression

that comes from the transition from a communal life to an individualized life. Peace Corps volunteers, who obviously aren't at war zones, the Peace Corps, but they are in very communal, organic, often even tribal, or at least agrarian community, in the developing world, and they come back to this country after two years, and around 25% of them

slip into a significant depression. If not trauma, it is the very real difficulty of going from a communal life to an individual life, and a lot of soldiers experience that. They try to match it with something like trauma, even though maybe they weren't in combat, but maybe a rocket landed on their base one day or something. They try to connect it to something, because they are seriously depressed. They just don't know what it's from. And I think, is the transition to an individualized life. So it's almost like our Western view of PTSD as some kind of individual disorder based on trauma.

Looking at it like that prohibits or basically prevents successful reintegration of veterans into our society. Because we look at it totally wrong. We're not even addressing the right problem. We're looking for a cause that trying to attribute that to something that wasn't necessarily there. The trauma, instead of saying,

hey, the problem is this communal living thing. They say, well, all right, let's see where the trauma is. well, there really wasn't that much. Well, I guess you probably kind of don't have that, or maybe you feel like you shouldn't have that because you weren't in combat. So now you're in limbo. All you know is you feel awful,

and there's no real explanation for it. Well, yeah, there's two things. If you really truly were traumatized and plenty of soldiers were, you will recover more quickly and more successfully in a group situation rather than as an individual. And they've done experiments with rats.

They've shown that. They've looked at child soldiers in Nepal who return to different kinds of villages. some are socially stratified, some are not, the ones that return to the unstratified cohesive villages recover much, much more quickly than the others. So there's a lot of data that if you're traumatized and you remain or you return to a communal existence,

a group existence, that you recover more successfully. So the first part of it is if you truly were traumatized in combat, if you're in the 10% that saw a lot of combat and you return home while messed up, if you return to a more communal situation, you're going to recover more successfully more quickly. But then there's a lot of people who were never traumatized at all. But they're experiencing a very real psychological struggle when they come home.

And they don't know why, right? They're like, well, you know, I was a cook on a big base. I didn't fight. I never fired my weapon. Like, what the hell? Why am I so messed up here? Well, it's possible that what they're not experiencing PTSD, the T meaning trauma. They weren't traumatized.

They're not experiencing that. What they're experiencing is the difficulties of transitioning from communal life to a solitary individualized life. That doesn't have a diagnosis. I mean, there is no diagnostic term for that, but we have the word PTSDs. It gets sort of channeled to that to the paradigm of trauma, even if the trauma isn't necessarily there. What can I do? If I'm listening to this right now, and I'm a veteran and I've come back and I realize I feel like I'm in limbo, I feel terrible, or somebody close to me is, what recommendations can you give? I mean, I realize you're not a physician or a therapist, but what have you seen that's effective or

even the beginning of effective to somebody who is affected by PTSD or whatever. Depression, PTSD, a lot of disorder, not borderline so much, but there's a lot of mental health issues that are, you know, really respond to counseling, to talk therapy. And there's a lot of techniques, therapeutic techniques for helping people who have survived trauma. And again, and not just soldiers. I mean, we keep thinking of PTSD is something that soldiers get. Like, life is traumatic. I mean, people have car accidents. They survive assault. They have children to get cancer. You know, I mean, life sucks for a lot of people, for everybody.

Eventually, life's going to suck. And there's real trauma. We're really talking about all of us. I mean, we don't want to create a special case for soldiers as if they're the only people who get traumatized. So broadly speaking, like, the more you are part of a vibrant, connected community that needs you and you need them in order to literally survive physically. Like, the more you're part of that kind of community, the better off you're going to do

psychologically in all kinds of ways, not just from recovering from trauma. Women are way less likely to experience postpartum depression, for example. So that's just a helpful, good human thing no matter what, no matter who you are. What I would say is whether you were traumatized or not, whether you're a soldier or not, if you're a human being and you've gone through a certain amount of rough stuff, as we all eventually will. The more you're part of a connected communal situation, the better off you're probably going to be. There are a lot of therapeutic techniques for helping people who have experience.

real trauma. Thanks so much for this. I really appreciate it. And is there anything else that I haven't asked you that you want to make sure you deliver? You know, one thing that I, what I say to people when I talk to them is, you, we've lost a lot of our communal connection in our neighborhoods. You know, soldiers come back and they, you know, they struggle, you know, to reintegrate into a society that's just not connected. There's nothing to reintegrate into. You know, that's all true, I think, and explains a certain amount of stuff. But in addition, one can get a sense of community from one's nation. I mean, it's different. You know, we humans, you know, been used to live in groups of 300 million,

we're attempting it now. You can get a certain amount of solidarity going in very large groups if you think about them in the right way. And I think one of the psychological ills of the time that I think it's probably affecting soldiers quite a lot is this new idea, and you hear it in the political discourse, this new idea that somehow we're not all part of one nation,

that there are groups of people who are somehow lesser or somehow exploiting other people. I remind people, which is in basic human terms, when you talk with contempt, when you have very, very powerful people who are basically running our lives, and they talk with contempt about other people inside the wire, as it were,

imagine we're all soldiers. Like you would never talk with contempt about someone inside the wire that you may depend on for your life. When you have very powerful people in this country that do that in their political discourse, they are creating the idea that it actually isn't one unified country,

that there are antithetical interests competing within the same country and only one person is going to emerge the winner. And that's psychologically a very, very difficult place to be. And I think it's hard on soldiers. I think it's hard on all of us. Frankly, honestly, personally, I think that kind of rhetoric is a threat to our democracy in a way that, you know, Al-Qaeda and ISIS just like never will be. I mean, democracy's messy. It should be messy. That's one of the things that's very rich and amazing about it. And there's going to be a lot of conflict and disagreement and argument and

differences of opinion and all that stuff. It's all great for democracy. It's great for society. It's human. But having contempt, like to really and mockery and contempt for someone inside the wire, inside the tribe is a very, very dangerous thing to do. You know, honestly, I think it can be stopped. I mean, 50 years ago, racism and public speech happened all the time. I mean, you know, soldiers came back from World War II, African-American soldiers and white American soldiers who fought side by side on the battlefields of Europe and South Pacific. And they came back to a country where in many states, they could not sit side-by-side at a lunch counter together.

imagine what that felt like. And within the lifetime of some of those men, they saw an African-American president. Like, things can change. And that kind of really revolting public racist speech, it's still protected under the First Amendment. It's still protected under freedom of speech, as it should be. But there is such severe social sanctions against it. They're basically no politician, no powerful person, no matter how racist they are, really dares say that kind of thing in public. using contempt against your fellow citizens, against your president, against your government. That also protected by free speech, of course, but it could be seen as so antithetical to American interest that is basically prohibited. Prohibited, meaning that there are severe consequences for doing it,

and no one who wants to be elected in the public office does it because they'll get spanked, basically, spanked at the polling book. So I think there's a way, it's our decision. We, the people of this country, if we don't want to have our political leaders talking with incredible disrespect about people we elected to office, about our own fellow Americans in this country. If we don't want that, we don't have to accept it. And if we want to see our fellow Americans in that life, well, maybe we're not one nation. Maybe we're actually several nations, and we should just get down to business and make that happen. But if we're going to say one nation, you better start acting that way. We better start acting that way. It's within the power of we,

the people, to enforce that on our political and our cultural leaders. Sebastian, thank you so much. Now, I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I went to L.A. and needed to get the first job that I could and got hired by this guy who was a pretty demanding boss. I was his personal assistant. He said, I need you to serve drinks at my poker game.

So I'm like, okay, great. And I bring my playlist and my cheese plate. And I'm thinking, you know, the players are going to be these overgrown frat boys. But then Ben Affleck walks in the room, Leo DiCaprio and a politician that was very well recognized and heads of studios, heads of banks. And all of a sudden I had this light ball moment that poker is my Trojan horse. I just need to control and have power over this game because it has this incredible hold over these people. Why do these guys, with their access to anyone and anything, come to this dingy basement to play this game? What is the most money you've seen someone lose in one night?

$100 million. How did the mob get involved? Around Christmas, door opened in the sky that I'd never seen before, pushed his way in, stuck a gun in my mouth. Then he beat the hell out of me, and he kind of gave me this speech about how, if I told anyone about this or if I didn't comply, then they would take a trip to Colorado to see my family. Then the feds got involved, and the first thing they did was they took all my money.

I moved back to L.A. I'd gotten a pretty decent job. 10 days later, I get a call in the middle of the night. This is agent so-and-so from the FBI. You need to come out with your hands up. I walk into my hallway. When my eyes adjusted to the high-beam flashlights, I saw 17 FBI agents, semi-automatic weapons pointed at me.

If you want to learn more about building rapport and generating the type of trust that Molly Bloom needed to run her multimillion dollar operation and hear about how it all came to an end, check out episode 120 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. I love the ideas behind community and integration. I really do feel like we've moved well away from that, even over my short lifetime. It's pretty prescient. We've definitely seen more discussion about this now than we did five, six years ago when I recorded this one. I was surprised to hear, though, that there can actually be real-world mental health consequences. I guess that should not be a

surprise, and yet somehow it was. It also doesn't surprise me that this is part of a problem that soldiers are facing reintegrating back into our society, a society which doesn't understand, maybe doesn't want to understand, and in fact profoundly misunderstands these soldiers' experiences. So hopefully, if you're a soldier, you found some value here. And if you're not, you found some concepts here that you can use to improve the way you treat other people and even the way you treat yourself. Big thank you to Sebastian Younger. All things Sebastian will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com.

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